In the last twenty years, the U.S. working class has been through recurring political crises, as well as political triumphs. In that time the U.S. people witnessed the election of our country’s first African American president, a devastating economic crash, a string of racist police murders, two presidential campaigns by a self-identified socialist, a global pandemic, mass uprisings, the rise of a fascistic demagogue, and more.
One underlying theme in nearly all the aforementioned events is the continuing struggle for African American equality, and for economic and social justice for all oppressed and working people.
African Americans, all brown and black folks, women, Asians, the LGBTQ+ and indigenous communities, and all workers continue to struggle for equal and fair representation in the U.S. halls of power, and for a voice in the democratic processes of the United States.
The 2020 uprisings, the largest string of mass protests in American history, saw millions of people take to the streets and demand justice for George Floyd and other black and brown men, women and children who lost their lives to racist police violence. The list of those the police murdered includes Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Korryn Gaines, Tamir Rice, Deborah Danner, Philando Castile and many others.
As I suggested in CPUSA must be a Party of militant anti-racism, a contribution to the 32nd National Convention pre-convention period, “The Black Lives Matter movement coupled with the growing support for progressive political change in general and socialism in particular, mobilized center/left forces against far right racist forces that seized political power through Trump’s POTUS campaign. But as the movement began to lull and the far right influence over political and social life grew, many socialist activists and organizers began searching for answers.”
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement lull, many are discussing the Black Belt Thesis in their clubs and with others outside of the Party. Party scholars and historians have presented material on the topic. For example, Timothy Johnson’s The Communist Party and the African American Question, featured in Faith in the Masses, Jamal Rich’s Five Misconceptions About the CP’s Stance on Black Liberation and recently released International Publishers title Half The World, edited by Bennett Shoop. This essay should serve as additional insight into the question from a historical as well as contemporary perceptive.
In keeping with Leninism, the CPUSA’s position on African American liberation is informed by and reflects the mass popular demands of African American and other oppressed peoples and workers using a scientific analysis of the conditions that lead to social struggle.
The democratic struggle against racial discrimination and the struggle for socialism are dialectically intertwined in the U.S. context.
The founders of our party broke with the Socialist Party based on differences in views on the relationship between anti-racist and class struggles. While the Socialist Party officially took the racist stance that the struggle for racial equality and justice would distract from the class struggle, the left nucleus within the Socialist Party, along with other like-minded organizations, united and formed the Communist Party, believing that the liberation of African Americans was (and continues to be) “the touchstone of the modern democratic idea.” They believed that the democratic struggle against racial discrimination and the struggle for socialism were dialectically intertwined in the U.S. context.
This idea was aligned with Lenin’s view of the democratic struggle, as suggested in A Caricature of Marxism & Imperialist Economism: “All ‘democracy’ consists in the proclamation and realization of ‘rights’ which under capitalism are realizable only to a very small degree and only relatively. But without the proclamation of these rights, without a struggle to introduce them now, immediately, without training the masses in the spirit of this struggle, socialism is impossible.”
Upon the Party’s founding, it’s first program expressed that “The racial oppression which is the special burden of the negro workers is essentially an expression of extreme economic exploitation. This complicates the negro struggle against oppression but it does not separate it from the general struggle of the working class.”
On the same basis, Party leader Claudia Jones developed the theory of the triply oppressed Black women worker. In An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!, published in Political Affairs in 1949, she theorized that “Negro women, as workers, as Negros, and as women, are the most oppressed stratum of the whole population” and put forth robust data on the economic and social status of African American women at the time. Against white chauvinism and patriarchal supremacy, she concluded that,
For the progressive women’s movement, the Negro woman, who combines in her status the worker, the Negro and the woman, is the vital link to this heightened political consciousness. To the extent, further, that the cause of the Negro woman worker is promoted, she will be enabled to take her rightful place in the Negro proletarian leadership of the national liberation movement, and by her active participation contribute to the entire American working class, whose mission is the achievement of a Socialist America… [emphasis added].
It should be noted that in 1946, just a few years prior to the publishing of An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!, Political Affairs, the Party’s monthly theoretical magazine at the time, published another essay from Claudia Jones titled, On The Right to Self-Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt. The relative chronological proximity of their respective publication years reflects that African American Party leaders of this era were not only self-reflecting on the African American liberation question in general, but also on the national question in particular. It also reflects that there was frequent debate on the issue between African American leaders and other leaders alike. In fact, this debate occurred over the span of many decades.
In the late 1920s, the Communist International passed and the CPUSA adopted a resolution stating that “the Negro question in the United States must be viewed from the standpoint of its peculiarity, namely, as the question of an oppressed nation” with distinctions “between the position of the Negro in the South and in the North.” The aforementioned distinctions were a particular point of debate, as the Great Migration and changing class character of the African American masses necessitated revision of the original position.
In her essay on Black self-determination, or the right of national secession, Claudia Jones writes that for Black Americans in the North, “the struggle for equal rights… is chiefly that of heightening the fight to secure equal participation in every sphere of American life” which is “enhanced by the presence of a large and growing Negro proletariat” (emphasis added). In the South, particularly the Black Belt, she says that Black people are “an historically developed community of people, with a common language, a common territory, and a common economic life, all of which are manifest in a common culture” (emphasis added) and therefore are an oppressed nation.
What is abundantly clear in her writing is that she did not believe the idea that Black Americans residing in the Black Belt constitute a nation negates their struggle for equal rights and integration.
She says in On The Right to Self-Determination for the Negro People in the Black Belt, Political Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 1, 1946:
In the Black Belt, the problem is chiefly that of wiping out the economic, political and social survivals of slavery, of the enforcement of equal rights. Without the necessary enforcement of equal rights for the Negro people in the Black Belt, including social equality, it is folly to speak of integration as being equal to the achievement of national liberation. Hence, equal rights for the Negro people in the Black Belt can be achieved only through enforcement, through their exercise of self-determination.
Resolutely, she argued that national self-determination was inclusive of struggles to address “the daily needs and problems of the wide masses of Negro people and white workers in the Black Belt” and “the working class struggle against exploitation”.
The events of the following two decades supported her position on African American self-determination, integration and working class struggle. The Civil Rights Movement, which was working-class in character, took shape and the stamp it left on the historical trajectory of the African American liberation movement remains unwavering. Unequivocally, the masses of African Americans struggled to secure integration “in every sphere of American life” on the basis of economic, democratic, political and social equality. Between the early 1950s and mid to late 1960s, the working class, lead by Black political leaders, defeated anti-interracial marriage laws, anti-miscegenation laws, the credo of “separate but equal,” and racist poll taxes. The struggle to integrate buses and schools led to broader demands for integration, codified in a series of civil rights legislation (Civil Rights Act of 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1968). The Montgomery Bus Boycotts, the Selma marches, the protests in Birmingham, and other forms of struggle in the Civil Rights Movement took place primarily in the South, where the right to self-determination had been proclaimed by so many! Keep in mind that these events occurred at the peak of the second Great Migration. Black Americans in the South moved to urban centers in Northeastern, Western and Midwestern regions of the country, dropping the population of Black southerners from almost 80% to just over 50%.
James Jackson, Party leader and founder of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) concluded that the issue of Black liberation is still a national question, however Black Americans are not constituted as a nation.
The severe political repression and violent crackdown of the 1940s-1950s McCarthy period was marked by Party members and affiliates being jailed, with others forced “underground,” and the dismantling of key mass organizations. Coming out of this period of crisis, emerging leaders of the mid-1950s saw it necessary to refocus the Party’s political outlook. Concurrent with the events of the Civil Rights Movement, Party leaders grappled with the issue of Black nationhood and the Black Belt as a part of that refocusing. At both the 16th and 17th National Conventions, Party members debated the issue and many of these opinions were published in discussion bulletins. James Jackson, Party leader and founder of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) concluded that the issue of Black liberation is still a national question, however Black Americans “are not constituted as a nation” and are an oppressed racial minority “who are a historically determined component of the American nation in the United States.” Others, such as Charlene Mitchell, another significant leader in the Party, worried that dropping the right to self-determination for the Black Belt would fundamentally change the way the Party viewed and organized in the Black community. She argued that if self-determination was no longer the correct approach, the Party must sufficiently satisfy the concerns of those who still believed it still was.
Ultimately, the Party adopted James Jackson’s analysis of the African American national question, explaining in Theoretical Aspects of the Negro Question in the United States that,
…the requisite preparation of the forces for effecting fundamental social change in the system necessitates the completion of the bourgeois-democratic norms of political, economic, and social development for the South in general and the Negro people in particular. Furthermore, a condition for accomplishing the prerequisite unity of the American working class with its class allies for advanced social struggle is to level main rails of the color bar. The struggle of the Negro people for the democratic goals of political, economic and social equality feeds into the general stream of the historic working class cause of our time – a powerful current which raises the torrential power of the whole cause of social advance.
Such analysis was not informed by James Jackson’s personal experience and opinion alone. Rather, it was participation in the Civil Rights Movement, the lived experiences expressed by Black workers along with Black members and candid observations of the historical trajectory of African American workers in struggle for equality that informed the analysis as well as the decision to adopt it as the Party’s official outlook.
The subsequent fallout of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and continued frustrations over the African American condition led to an increase in radical activity in some sections of the Black liberation struggle. However, in many ways this activity embodied confusion on political strategy, often supplanting working class politics for petty-bourgeois radicalism. This period, often associated with the New Communist Movement, saw Black and non-Black radicals resurrect the Belt Belt Thesis – the outdated interpretation of the Black national question. CPUSA leaders defended the updated analysis in response. James Jackson wrote that the outdated interpretation was an “unscientific, subjectivist concept” and “rejects the Marxist-Leninist view of a nation as being a material community of people with very definite features.” The movement of Black Americans from the South to the Northern, Western and Midwestern regions of the country complicates one very important definite feature of nationhood.
In Separatism – A Bourgeois Nationalist Trap, Revolutionary Tracings, Jackson continues,
This view simply takes out the Leninist definition of a nation the essential characteristic–that of a “common territory”–the most important attribute, the base upon which the other features could take shape!
To eliminate “common territory” from the characteristics of a nation is like taking the mainspring out of a watch. It may then still look like a watch, have a watch’s face and hands, but will it truly be a watch?
Thus, any semblance of a Black nation would have been confined to just a small geographical area where African Americans remained the majority – an area that was shrinking by the year due to the dispersion of the African American population within the United States.
The migration of African Americans is linked to the proletarianization of Black workers. This phenomenon was observed even when self-determination in the Black Belt was the official CPUSA stance – recall Claudia Jones’ consistent referral to the proletarian character of Black workers in both her essays mentioned above. The practice of sharecropping was fading as early as the 1940s, in part because of advancements in farming technology but also due to the organizing activities of sharecroppers demanding better working conditions. Some New Communist Movement radicals seemed to not understand the historical and political significance of the changing dynamic between the Black masses and Southern land. In response to the accusation that the CPUSA restricted the right to self-determination by acknowledging this changing dynamic, Henry Winstonin The Fallacy of the Internal Colony, Class, Race and Black Liberation (1977) said,
After the Civil War, the freed slaves were still tied to the land they did not own. Later, when capitalism in its monopoly stage smashed these links with the land, the descendants of slaves were transformed into proletarians – suffering every form of economic, social and political inequality within a system which locked them, along with white workers, into a single monopoly-capitalist-controlled economy…
…The only independent policy for Black liberation is the facing up to the fact that the transformation accompanying urbanization and proletarianization of the Black condition carried with it an unchallengeable demand: an equal share for Black people in the control of the total U.S. economy, built with so many centuries of Black chattel and wage slavery.
Both Henry Winston and James Jackson juxtapose the subjective nature of the old interpretation of the Black national question with the scientific analysis developed by the Party on the matter, formed in accordance with Marxist-Leninist principles. The economic and social integration of Black America into the American economic and social whole was an undeniable historical fact Communist Party leaders could not ignore for the sake of appeasing the confused New Communist Movement radicals. As Lenin put it in Cultural-National Autonomy, Critical Remarks on the National Question (1913), “Under the slogan of ‘national culture’ the bourgeoisie of all nations…are in fact pursuing a policy of splitting the workers, emasculating democracy and haggling…over the sale of the people’s rights and the people’s liberty.” Further,
Marxism cannot be reconciled with nationalism, be it even of the ‘most just’, ‘purest’, most refined and civilized brand…the Marxist fully recognize the historical legitimacy of national movements…But to prevent this recognition from becoming an apologia of nationalism, it must be strictly limited to what is progressive in such movements, in order that this recognition may not lead to bourgeois ideology obscuring the proletarian consciousness.
Without the land connection, where all other definite features of a nation blossom from, and to rely solely on the cultural distinctions of African Americans, would be to pursue not a progressive policy, but a policy of regressive segregation. In their confusion, by resurrecting the old national question interpretation, the New Communist Movement radicals resurrected the long defeated policies of Jim Crow.
The mass Black Lives Matter movement, which saw a peak in 2020 during the George Floyd uprisings, cast further doubt on the separatist fantasy. Black Lives Matter is not only a mass democratic and economic movement, but a cultural movement that has shaped American consciousness in its wake, further diminishing the distinction between African American culture and the culture of the U.S. as a whole. It’s worth mentioning that this distinction has been diminishing for many decades due to the end of legal segregation and rise of the internet, which allowed African American culture to be widely disseminated. However, the Black Lives Matter movement is bringing African American culture to new heights, where common Black phrases, such as “stay woke” have made it into the national lexicon. Black artists who display and evoke Black cultural imagery, such as Kendrick Lamar, Beyonce, Jordan Peele, and Viola Davis, now maintain popularity across racial lines. On the flip side, the popularity of Black culture is often exploited by the capitalist class. One should take stock of artists like Sexyy Red and Kodak Black, their portrayals of Blackness and their recent affiliations with Donald Trump as well as the broader right wing political sphere. Another glaring example is rapper Kanye West, who at one point had a net worth of over $1.6 billion, and his relationship to the far right. A once strong advocate for Black artistry and critic of institutional racism in the earlier stages of his career, is now a self described fan of Adolf Hitler and believer in slavery being a choice. It’s important to note that West’s battle with mental health woes, perpetuated by the passing of his mother in 2007, did not stop far right actors from taking advantage of his newfound bizarre, anti-Black political beliefs or using his creative talent to amplify their own bigoted ideas.
The contemporary development of the African American liberation struggle remains wholly aligned with its historic demand for full political, social and economic equality within the framework of American society–-a society undeniably shaped by Black (slave and wage) labor as well as the social contributions made by Black freedom fighters. The CPUSA continues to pursue a policy in line with it’s two historic values; African American liberation is not a pursuit for the future, but a struggle for the here and now, lest socialism is impossible and development on the Black national question must be rooted in the realities and political demands of African American workers. Necessarily, our Party has not resurrected the old interpretation of the Black national question. In Leninism and the African American national question: A reply to Halabi, Co-Chair Joe Sims and Party leader Jarvis Tyner explain,
… there are many forms the national question assumes: the two primary ones are a) an oppressed nation; and b) an oppressed national minority…
The latter are revealed in multinational states, where within the framework of capitalist economies, national minorities are compelled to live and work within the framework of an existing common territory, economy, language, culture etc. In the U.S. this began with occupation by European powers of Native American lands and slavery…
…what defines the Black national question as Du Bois has demonstrated is not only oppression but the specific forms of oppression that African Americans as a people and workers experience, first as slaves, then sharecroppers, and finally as an overwhelmingly working-class population.
In this process African Africans both historically and today have expressed what they consider to be the main forms of their freedom fight (i.e. their self-determination) as the demand for complete and unconditional equality within the framework of the U.S. bourgeois democratic republic. (In Leninism and the African American national question: A reply to Halabi, CPUSA.org, 2019)
To obfuscate the clear historical trajectory of the African American liberation movement, to attempt to derail the movement from its current path by resurrecting bourgeois separatism, long rejected by the Black American working class, is to advocate for the undoing of decades worth of struggle for Black liberation. It is to advocate that Black Americans go back in time by over a century and start from scratch. It is to deny Black Americans the demand of equal participation in every sphere of American life. It is to reject the reality and to deny the undeniable.
For non-Black radicals to champion separatism through the resurrection of the old national question interpretation, the Black Belt Thesis, is to resurrect Jim Crow.
Further, the incessant championing of bourgeois separatism from non-Black radicals must be viewed with suspicion, even where sincerity is noted. In addition to what’s listed above, for non-Black radicals to champion separatism through the resurrection of the old national question interpretation, the Black Belt Thesis, is to resurrect Jim Crow. It’s to engage in a sinister form of chauvinism, that sublates earnest desires to assist in the struggle for Black liberation into racist paternalism. The CPUSA has a long history of combating chauvinism at times when it was most potent. In a special report on the topic, former General Secretary Gus Hall said “…above all, white chauvinism is the ideological polluter that makes it possible for capitalism to sustain and continue the special system of oppression and exploitation of 25 million Black Americans.” What separates working class revolutionaries from chauvinist radicals is who and how many are moved by their political demands, for the former moves millions and the latter is only able to move just a handful of intellectuals. Chauvinist radicals favor narrow abstract demands that, as Lenin says, are “absurd, semi-anarchist ideas.” In contrast, working class revolutionaries are, as Lenin says, attentive “to the mass struggle in progress” occurring through organizations, like the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, where Black workers are organized. Indeed those Black workers are organized independently, on the basis of race and class. However, they’re organized not toward a bourgeois separatist policy, but a policy of working class unity across racial lines.
For the CPUSA, a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party, to adopt the narrow view of a handful of radicals would be to not only abandon the clear Leninist concepts outlined in this essay, but to abandon the masses of Black workers and succumb to the very racist, anti-revolutionary concepts that set us apart from the Socialist Party. Former Black Party member Kendra Alexander explains in The Fallacy of the Internal Colony, Class, Race and Black Liberation (p. 115), “The Socialist Party… pursued a chauvinist policy. To the special oppression of Black people – to lynching, segregation, disenfranchisement, to racist repression and super exploitation – they provided no answer except to vote Socialist.”
Our Party and its membership cannot commit the same chauvinist error that set us apart from the Socialist Party and the New Communist Movement radicals. We cannot engage in imprudent sloganeering, detached from the mass Black worker’s demands, that provide no immediate answers to police brutality, the school to prison pipeline, the racist war on drugs, barriers to political participation in democracy and the rise of facism. The ruling class’ policy is that of segregation and separatism, as racist and chauvinist trickery are two of their most mighty weapons of oppression. In contrast, the Marxist-Leninist policy of our Party must continue to be unwavering and unshakable working class unity across all races, genders, religions and minor differences, championing the demands that move millions toward the revolutionary goal.
Images: War/Philly Blues/Deeper Bop (1979) Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence; George Floyd protests in Washington DC. H St. Lafayette Square by Rosa Pineda (CC BY-SA 4.0), Martin Luther King Jr. mourning march by wallpaperflare (Creative Commons); Jim Crow Laws by OER Commons (Creative Commons).
